Three cases with jargon aphasia were reported. KS and TY had good articulation and almost of their speech was readily transcribable. Their utterance consisted of remarkable amount of neologism, and there were few recognizable words. Unlike neologistic jargon, however, there was no apparent differenciation of content words from function words, and word boundaries were unclear except for pauses. KH's utterance was composed of several strings of distorted phonemes in which even syllabic segmentation was unrecognizable. Therefore, his speech was almost untranscribable. Unlike non-fluent global aphasia, the amount of his utterance was not so small, speech-rate was relatively high, and there was no effort when attempting to produce utterance.
    We performed a historical review for undifferenciated jargon, and pointed out several confusions about this term. Basically in line with a classification advanced by Yamadori (1994) , we presented a modified version of classification in which the term “undifferenciated jargon” was abandoned. We have introduced the term untranscribable jargon to designate a form of jargon consisting of strings of unintelligible sounds in which even syllabic boundaries are unclear. The term syllabic jargon was adopted to designate a type of well-articulated jargon consisting of contineous stream of syllables without linguistic meanings. The difference between syllabic jargon and neologistic jargon is that the former affects function words as well as content words, while the latter leaving function words intact. The pathogenesis and the responsible lesions for the three types of jargon were discussed.

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    We report a case of pure route finding defect and topographical amnesia due to a right retrosplenial subcortical hematoma. The subject, a 53-year-old right-handed male, suddenly lost his way home when driving his car. He was alert and spoke fluently. Both his visual acuity and visual field were normal. No motor or sensory deficits were detected. Severe route finding defect and topographical amnesia were observed. He could recognize landmarks, but failed to recognize their relative locations. He also lost his way at home, in the hospital, and around town. He could not state orally the layout of his house or map out his home. He could not draw them either. He could not locate main cities on a map. His visuo-perceptive and construction abilities were normal. Unilateral spatial neglect and prosopagnosia were not detected. A color test was normal. Brain CT and MRI revealed a right retrosplenial subcortical hematoma. There have been several articles that report the significance of the right retrosplenial region as a lesion producing the route finding defect and topographical disorder. The present case showed pure route finding defect and topographical amnesia clinically. Brain imaging revealed the right retrosplenial subcortical hematoma. In conclusion, the right retrosplenial region is an important pathogenic lesion behind the route finding defect and topographical amnesia.

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    The performance of three tasks—line bisection, line length discrimination, and line bisection after line length discrimination—was tested in 10 patients with left unilateral spatial neglect. To assess line length discrimination ability, a line is drawn perpendicular to a given line, and the patient judges which half of the divided line is longer. The point of subjective equality is calculated by the linear interpolation method using an ogive curve. In line bisection after a line length discrimination task, subjects are required to bisect a line immediately after they have performed a line length discrimination task.
    In all patients, rightward displacement occurred less frequently in the line length discrimination task and line bisection after line length discrimination task than in the line bisection task. When the results for individual patients were examined, in 5 of the 10 patients rightward displacement occurred significantly less frequently in the line bisection task after line length discrimination than in the line bisection task. In 8 of the 10 patients, the results of judgment in the line length discrimination task were qualitatively similar to the adjustment in the line bisection task based on their experience in the line length discrimination task.
    These results suggest that patients with left unilateral spatial neglect retain relatively good line length discrimination ability and that when line bisection is tested after a line length discrimination task, the patient's judgment in line bisection is appropriately adjusted on the basis of line length discrimination.

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    It has been known that self-assessed memory function is not always coincide with objective memory function in normal adults. We investigated relationships among subjective feeling of forgetfulness, depressive state, and obsessionality in 90 subjects (56 males, 34 females, 33 ˜ 87 y. O., mean age 59 y. O.) who received brain health screening in Shimane Institute of Health Science. Self-assessed memory function and feeling of forgetfulness were estimated by Roujinken version of the memory scale. Obsessionality was assessed by Japanese version of Leyton's obsessionalilty. Objective memory function was also assessed by Okabe's memory scale. Depressive state was scored by Zung's self-rating depression scale.
    The self-assessed memory scores and feeling of forgetfulness were significantly correlated with the scores in the obsessional inventory (p<0.0001), but not with the scores in Okabe's memory scale. Subjective feeling of forgetfulness was weakly related to depressive state. Aging did not affect these scores.
    These results suggest that obsessionality is one of the important factors for discrepancy between self-assessed memory impairment and objective memory scale.

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    This study was designed to evaluate the pragmatic abilities of persons with aphasia. The purpose was to answer the following questions : (1) Can the patients perform as both a speaker and a listener? ; (2) Are their behavioral patterns different across contexts? The subjects were 8 aphasic patients (4 had severe and 4 had mild ˜ moderate aphasia) and 4 normal adults matched for age, sex and educational background. All the subjects were right-handed.
    First the subjects were videotaped during both free-talking with the author and performance of pointing tasks which were designed for aphasic patients. Then these videotapes were analyized by using interval recording strategies.
    Results suggested that in terms of quality aphasic patients retained pragmatic abilities as well as normal subjects, but in terms of quantity patients' abilities were lower than those of normal subjects. The nonverbal behavioral patterns of aphasic patients, for example, eye contact, facial expressions, and gestures, were different across the two contexts.
    It was also suggested that video analysis strategies were useful in evaluation, especially of severely aphasic patients who could not perform on tests.

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    We gave speech therapy for a period of 17 months to an 80 year old aphemic patient. According to the computed tomography, the site of the lesion of the cerebral infarction was limited to the perirolandic area. At the onset, the only speech sound the patient could produce voluntarily was [ə]. He could not imitate any speech sounds or any movements of the speech organs asked by the therapist. He also had bucco-facial apraxia. However, his listening and comprehension, as well as his writing and reading remained close to intact. He did not produce any automatic speech and in comparing the difficulty of speech sound production, we found no difference between his automatic-reflective speech and his intentional-purposeful speech. His speech therapy program consisted mainly of articulation treatment and writing. Despite the fact that he had recovered from his bucco-facial apraxia, the articulation treatment was not so effective. 2 hypotheses try to explain the compensatory mechanism for articulatory disturbances : Nielsen suggested that the homologous area in the minor hemisphere does the compensation and Levine et al. explain that the source of the compensation is the residual region around the Broca's area in the dominant hemisphere. However the clinical findings of the present case do not support either of these 2 hypotheses.

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    This study investigated qualitative changes in paralexias over twenty months in a Wernicke aphasic patient. The error patterns of reading kanji aloud during therapy were compared for 70 errors on the sixth, twelveth and twentieth month after onset. As a result, neologistic paralexias and semantic paralexias decreased, while literal paralexias and literal or/and semantic paralexias on reading kanji aloud increased, although the pecentage correct for reading kanji aloud showed no change on the Standard Language Test of Aphasia. The semantic paralexias showed an increase in semantic-related errors, but a decrease in semantic-unrelated errors. These results suggest that we are likely to observe improvement by analyzing changes in the error patterns over time, although the percentage correct on the Standard Language Test of Aphasia did not change. In conclusion, it is important to observe not only quantitative but also qualitative changes.

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    We examined the ability of an aphasic patient reading aloud and writing to dictation kana letters from the perspective of cognitive model of syllabary processing. Her disability in reading kana letters was relatively severe, but she could read them aloud by reciting the syllabary to reaching the target letter. However, she could not use the same method for writing to dictation kana letters. These results suggest that strings of sounds and letters of the syllabary may be separately preserved while the input and output modalities are separately disturbed.

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